Klaus Lackner is chair of Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering in Columbia University’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and Director of the Lenfest Center for Sustainable Energy of the Earth Institute. He is a renowned physicist researching and advocating carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), a controversial method of removing carbon from the air and storing it underground to reduce the atmospheric carbon concentration.

The story goes that your daughter Claire did a science project that got you started on carbon capture research. Is that the true origin story or were you doing research on it already?

I was doing CCS years before that. What is true is she was in middle school, and she showed up in my office at home and said, “I need a project for a science fair, what should we do?” And I said, “Well Claire, maybe you should think about capturing CO2 from the air,” which at the time I already was thinking about but I don’t think I’d accomplished anything yet. She came up with some very clever ideas of how to make it real, and she learned an awful lot on this project and actually provided some experimental data, which later on helped.

For example, at some point there was an argument whether carbon capture was even possible, and I said if not, the experiment wouldn’t have worked. I said, “Well it’s actually quite clear how this works, even my daughter could do it” so before I knew it this turned into the story.

Before that point had you thought of getting carbon out of the air?

Well, in the early nineties I got very interested in solar energy. Around that time, I was looking at pros and cons of various forms of energy, and what hit me is how conveniently packaged fossil fuels are in terms of energy density. I said to myself, how in the world could I possibly win with a big klutzy solar panel against the exceedingly compact energy that comes from fossil fuels?

So bottom line, I got involved in carbon capture research, and I was immediately convinced the problem is the storage, not the capture. Everybody said the capture is the difficult part, which in a sense is true because it’s the expensive part. Back then I didn’t formulate it this way, but now I would say the capture is ultimately a private good that private companies can figure out. What makes the storage so difficult is the huge volume of carbon dioxide. That ultimately makes it a public good; it needs to be publicly regulated and controlled.

After looking at all the options that were on the table, I decided the really exciting way to go, the long-term real way to go, is mineral sequestration. At the time, everybody said, “You are foolish, it’s going to be ocean disposal,” and I said, “I don’t think so.” By now, ocean disposal is off the table, and everybody says it will be underground injection. My view is, yes, it will be [underground injection], but that will not be enough. So I’m holding out on my mineral sequestration*.

Where would you start for underground sequestration?

I would probably do what has been done before and go below the ocean somewhere because people don’t live right above it. So, if it leaks out a little, people wouldn’t be harmed.

That sounds simple, but, if it does leak out, isn’t it a bigger problem than who is immediately around?

Well, if you sequester the carbon in a basement and it leaks ever so slightly and you walk in the basement, it can kill you. But, if the carbon leaks into the bottom of the ocean ever so slightly, you wouldn’t even notice.

My view is that there are two fundamental issues we need to convince the public of. One is safety, and the more remote you make the sequestration site, the less stringent the safety issue is. If you are in the middle of nowhere and the CO2 distributes itself, there is no harm. If this happens in a city, you have a disaster on your hands, so being far away from people clearly makes it easier to convince the public that, if something terrible happens, nobody comes to harm. But convincing people that those things don’t happen is absolutely critical.

The second part is you actually have to be able to account for it [CCS] with a great safety plan, and I got in a run in with the “referees” because I want to have a plan in case something goes wrong rather than saying, “It just can’t happen!” which is the instinctive response. What you really want to do is build into the disposal site a means of letting the CO2 back out in a controlled fashion in case anything goes wrong.

And then we’re back where we started.

And then we’re back where we started, which is better than having an accident. But the counterargument I heard from the referees is, “I wouldn’t put it there if I expected things to happen,” and my argument is yes, I wouldn’t put it there either if I expected it to happen. I could have made a misjudgment, so I’m allowing for the possibility – albeit very unlikely – that this was a misjudgment. I want to have an agreement up front that if certain things happen which are by themselves still harmless, we all agree the system is out of control and we have to let the carbon out.

So what would be your ideal solution to the carbon problem? A mixture of CCS and solar power?

Ultimately, I think the markets will figure that out. My guess is…these various options will slug it out, and there will probably not be a clear winner. There will be several of them that compete for different markets, which is how it is now.

I don’t think capture and storage fundamentally should push the balance in its [Carbon’s] favor; it’s not big enough for that. One thing I’ve learned is I can’t predict these things. I have a hard time seeing, in the short run, that fossil fuels will fall out of the mix because they are so prevalent and are such a great price. If they told you “You can’t use them,” you would have an energy crisis of incredible proportions. Yet there’s nothing wrong with saying we could all live on solar energy and wind energy and things like that – yes we can – but that transition would be exceedingly rough.

Where we are in 100 years, I don’t know. Where we are in 20 years, I guarantee you we still have a lot of fossil fuels. But, in 20 years, we’d better have matched that with carbon capture and storage, or you will have a problem.
What is your response to people who are against carbon capture because they believe it enables an unsustainable lifestyle?

What does it mean to be unsustainable? I don’t think we have ever been sustainable.
The moment we had technology we became unsustainable, and we have to fix the problems that are associated.

I try to avoid making moral judgments about issues like consumerism, and, yes, we could get into that argument. But, in the end, what’s objectionable is that the use of all these fossil fuels creates damages, and, if we can remove these damages, why not? I’m aware of the fact that the CO2 is not the only damage, but right now it is…the leading damage, the most disconcerting damage. So you tend to fix these things one at a time.

There’s evidence that gross national product is directly related to energy use. What do you think of the argument that developing countries need access to energy and fossil fuels to improve their economies?

The attitude that India shouldn’t have cars is deplorable. I think we need to accommodate the fact that there will be 10 billion people in the world, or nearly 10 billion people, who all want to have a standard of living. And you can’t tell them, “Sorry, we have it and you can’t.” That’s not an answer, and I think that population increase alone will raise energy consumption dramatically. I mean, if 10 billion people start consuming like we do, that’s an increase by a factor of 10.

Do you feel competition from other researchers working on developing CCS technology?

Genevieve Joy is a senior at Columbia University where she studies English and Sustainable Development. She is a Managing Editor of Consilience with experience researching sea level rise and environmental marine policy.